Turning 28: Things I Learned and Loved This Past Year

Never did I ever expect to celebrate a birthday in the midst of a global pandemic when social distancing and quarantine are king and gathering with my people is not allowed… but here we are! Making the most of it, and making memories I’m sure to never forget.

28. Dang. Feels solid. Feels good.

In keeping with tradition, here’s my annual birthday reflection post, compiled from all the journals I’ve filled over the past year and all the Instagrams I’ve posted and Amazon carts I’ve shopped. Enjoy!

28 things I learned over the past year:

Transformation looks like this:
1. your desired self in you
2. your fear-driven self
3. coming to the end of this self
4. facing the truth of yourself with Jesus
5. your Christ is redeeming self
6. your true self
7. your free self in Christ
Setting worry appointments where I schedule time to feel my feelings and address my anxieties is a helpful strategy.
Scaling back and saying no and letting things go is both painful and necessary. It is hard and it can be good.
Loss is hard and heavy. Change brings a lot of chaos and confusion. When these things happen within a church, within a team, the feelings that accompany them are exhausting and can be overwhelming. Healing and rebuilding take so much longer than you expect, and there’s no such thing as “returning to normal.” But, there can be good on the other side of loss and grief and ends, and it’s worth fighting through the feelings to come into the newness.
Being dumped sucks. (It had never happened to me before.) It takes a long time to get over somebody rejecting you, especially when you envisioned a future with them. There’s light and life on the other side of this grief, too.
Say yes to the babysitting and housesitting jobs. The time with kiddos and the change of scenery is good for the soul, and helpful in the debt payoff department, too.
Strong back= grounded confidence, boundaries. Soft front=staying vulnerable and curious. Wild heart=living out these paradoxes. (Thanks, Brene Brown.)
The opposite of play is not work, the opposite of play is depression. (Stuart Brown)
I have a STRONG pattern of dating emotionally unavailable men. (Charting this out in counseling was eye-opening and hugely helpful.)
“Busy is our default. Margin takes intention.” (Emily P. Freeman)
“We need time to work through feelings. We need the space and permission to work through these feelings in the awkward, uncomfortable, sometimes messy way that people work through feelings. This is life. This is growth. This is okay.” (Melody Beattie)
“I need Christ, not something that resembles him.” (CS Lewis)
“We always live what we believe. We just don’t always live what we profess we believe.” (Dallas Willard)
I’m glad I stayed.
If there wasn’t real danger, it wasn’t real wilderness— it was a park. Wilderness is not optional. Jesus doesn’t protect us from the wilderness— he leads us—drags us—into it. The wilderness is where God changes people. (from Barbara Brown Taylor’s talk at Evolving Faith)
God is not a human gender.
Let God love you.
It’s not my job to figure out the answers to the questions of our day. It’s not my place to decide who gets to be in or who should be out. It’s not up to me to determine who is worthy of God’s love or who is wrong or right or what the Bible ACTUALLY means. It’s my call to love my God and love my neighbors and love myself. And when God said love my neighbor? I think God meant “love thy foreign, homeless, prostitute, imprisoned, disabled, gay, straight, transgender, enemy, blue collar, white collar, old, young, black, white, lonely, jewish, muslim, christian, ashiest, male, female, racist, addicted, rich, poor, liberal, conservative, different from you, _____ neighbor.” (thank you for these words, Neighborly)
EMDR is life-changing and life-saving. (more on that here)
I am fully seen and fully loved.
I find my way home when I… share what’s been bottled up inside either at counseling or with close people, when I’m living out the rhythms I know are healthy and life-giving, and when I spend committed time in solitude in nature, praying and journaling and reading and breathing.
Sabbath is essential. It gives my soul time to catch up to my body. It helps me be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus would do if he were me. (We must eliminate hurry, and that’s best done gamefully. —John Mark Comer)
Glory is God’s essence, the excellence of God’s being. Goodness is our action, excellence expressed in deeds.
I don’t want to be so focused on my goals that I miss God.
“Learning to honor my pain— to listen to my heart, mind, and soul— allows me to respond with kindness and move toward healing.” (Aundi Kolber)
What was true in the light is still true in the dark.
Global pandemics can happen, and are bonkers, and bring fear and anxiety, and are unprecedented and unpredictable and unfamiliar, but there can also be peace in the middle of the storm. (Also, I’m really good at self-isolating and social distancing and quarantining at home by myself.)
The Lord is God and there is not other. (Pete Bowell)